A technique commonly adopted for the production of cardboard tubes is one making use of tube-forming machines provided with a spindle on which there are wound—to form a series of spirals being superimposed and offset of a predetermined pitch—a plurality of webs of paper or similar material suitably glued in correspondence of a surface intended to result in facing relationship to the spindle. The gluing is not operated on the first web of the series, as it is intended to directly make contact with the spindle. The motion of the webs is ensured by a belt wound around the spindle which, in addition, causes the rotation and the advancement of the tube under formation with respect to the spindle's longitudinal axis.
A tube-forming machine so constructed and operating is described in WO 95/10400 and WO 95/10399.
The webs, being spirally superimposed and mutually glued to form the tube, unwind from corresponding feeding reels.
Each of the reels is mounted on a corresponding support associated with means for gluing the respective web. A plurality of supports, independent from each other, are mounted in such a way as to form in their entirety a kind of fan-like figure, so that each web is directed towards the spindle of the tube-forming machine according to a corresponding angle of incidence. In relation to this, the devices presently known for supplying webs to tube-forming machines are relatively bulky, take up excessive space and force the webs to run along cross routes and in different planes, thereby contributing to a poorly rational exploitation of the available spaces at the production site.